ball, &c.; for a candle run through an orange is ten, a swan with an orange in her mouth is twenty." In a brief chapter devoted to "shorthand writing," he details an ingenious method of reading by ideas, although it would be difficult to imagine the utility of it. "There is," he says, "a kind of a Shorthand writing in this Art, by the Ideas of letters objected to the eye of the fancy, as the Alphabet is objected to the sight of the bodily eye. Now for brevity sake, using colors instead of vowels, the eye of a nimble fancy will read anything by Ideas thus figured, as readily as if it were written in a book, and will retain what thus is written. Now the Ideas of this alphabet be these, and such like as your fancy best pleaseth to make choice of; A, a pair of Compasses so made; b a Lute, B, a Bow bent with an arrow in it; C, an Horn, &c., and so in like manner take instruments or any kind of Ideas for the rest of the letters which be like the letters, and instead of vowels use these colours—A for white, for E blew or green, for I red, for O black, for U yellow." The volume is a small one, and nothing but the barest suggestions of the system are given. As, however, he advertised that he might be consulted on the subject "at the Green Dragon, over against Saint Antholin's Church, in London," he probably had good reasons for his brevity.
A further attempt to facilitate the remembrance of numerals was made in 1648 by Stanislaus Mink von Wenussheim, or Winckelmann, who published at Marburg in a paper entitled "Parnassus" the particulars of a new art of memory. Besides using the pictures and localities, of his predecessors, he gave as a "most fertile secret" a method of combining letters with figures to express numbers by words. As this is the earliest record of what now forms the basis of most modern systems, Winckelmann's key will be read with interest. It is as follows:—
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 0 |
| B | C | F | G | L | M | N | R | S | T |
| P | K | V | |||||||
| W | Z |
The vowels and aspirate were used to form words—the phrase "apeo imo agor" denoting 1648. I may mention as
